When a callee (subscriber B) receives a call from a caller (subscriber A) it is advantageous if the callee receives information on the caller for example in order to decide if he/she accepts the call. In mobile communication this kind of situation is traditionally achieved by utilizing the phone book in the user equipment. The user pre-stores contact details, such as MSISDN number with names, in a memory of the user device or subscriber identity module, and when the user i.e. the callee receives the call from a subscriber A, the user equipment is configured to retrieve caller details from the phone book on a basis of MSISDN number delivered in the call and as a result the callee (subscriber B) may see on the display of the user equipment the caller name. This works fine as long as the callee has pre-stored the information on the caller in the memory. However, when the caller is unknown to the callee the phone book based solution does not work.
Another known solution to achieve the same outcome is such that when the subscriber B receives the call the user equipment is configured to initiate a query towards a network element in order to retrieve information, such as a name, of a subscriber A. This kind of arrangement, at least in principle, solves the above described problem and by means of the arrangement it is also possible to provide information on unknown callers to the callee. However, the problem is that the arrangement requires that an application is installed in the user equipment, which is configured to perform the query to the network node. The challenge may also be when the network coverage is limited during the incoming call. Then it may happen that the retrieval of information on subscriber A takes too long while the call is already ringing and as a result the desired information cannot be provided to the callee. Further challenge with the existing solutions is that the user equipment may restrict giving the MSISDN of the caller to the installed application, thus the application not being able to identify the caller MSISDN to perform a query on the network node, e.g. to retrieve the caller name.
According to still further prior art solution it is possible to establish a specific communication environment by means of which enhanced services, such as phonebook, messaging and call services, may be offered. Such an environment is so called Rich Communication Service (RCS) environment in which inter-operator services based on IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) may be offered. The RCS environment also provides a mechanism for providing information in the context of a call, which mechanism is called as a call composer procedure. However, the problem with the RCS based solution is that it requires that both parties support the RCS environment. Otherwise the provision of information is not possible.
Thus, there is need to develop improved solutions in order to enable a provision of information from the caller to callee in a context of a call.